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“Yeah, we’ll do that.” With Blue in tow, he headed for the door.
Blue broke the thick silence as Dean shot out onto the highway. “I’m not lying to her. If she asks the color of our bridesmaids’ dresses, I’m telling her the truth.”
“No bridesmaids, so no problem,” he said caustically. “We’re eloping to Vegas.”
“Anybody who knows me knows I’d never elope to Vegas.”
“She doesn’t know you.”
“Presumably you do, and getting married there is like admitting to the world that you’re too disorganized to come up with a better plan. I have more pride.”
He turned up the radio to drown her out. Blue hated misjudging people, especially men, and she couldn’t get
past his callousness toward his mother’s fatal illness. She turned the volume back down to punish him. “I’ve always wanted to go to Hawaii, but, until now, I couldn’t afford it. I think we’ll get married there. On the beach of some ritzy resort at sunset. I’m so glad I found a rich husband.”
“We’re not getting married!”
“Exactly,” she shot back. “Which is why I don’t want to lie to your mother.”
“Are you on my payroll or not?”
She sat up straighter. “Am I? Let’s talk about that.”
“Not now.” He looked so irritable that she temporarily fell silent.
They passed an abandoned cotton mill nearly swallowed up by undergrowth, then a well-maintained mobile home park, followed by a golf course that advertised karaoke Friday nights. Here and there an old plow or a wagon wheel held up a mailbox. She decided to make a stealth attack on her fake fiancé’s private life. “Since we’re engaged, don’t you think it’s time you told me about your father?”
His knuckles tightened ever so slightly on the steering wheel. “No.”
“I’m fairly good at connecting the dots.”
“Un-connect them.”
“It’s hard. Once I get an idea in my head…”
He shot her a killer glare. “I don’t talk about my father. Not to you. Not to anybody.”
She argued with herself for only a moment before she went for it. “If you really want to keep his identity a secret, you should probably stop going all stony-faced every time Jack Patriot comes on the radio.”
He uncurled his fingers and draped them over the top of the wheel, the gesture a little too casual. “You’re overdramatizing. My father was a drummer in Patriot’s band for a while. That’s all there is to it.”
“Anthony Willis is the only drummer the band has ever had. And since he’s black…”
“Check your rock history, babe. Willis sat out most of the Universal Omens tour with a broken arm.”
Dean might be telling the truth, but somehow Blue didn’t think so. April had been open about her rock and roll past, and Blue had seen the way they’d both frozen up when “Farewell, So Long” came on the radio. The possibility that Dean might be Jack Patriot’s son made her head spin. She’d had a crush on the rock star since she was ten. No matter where she’d lived, she’d kept his tapes stacked by her bed and magazine pictures of him pasted inside her school notebooks. His lyrics made her feel less alone.
A city limits sign announced that they’d reached Garrison. A second sign just below it declared that the town was for sale and that anyone interested in buying it should contact Nita Garrison. She twisted in her seat as they whipped past. “Did you see that? How can anybody sell a town?”
“They sold one on eBay a while back,” he said.
“That’s right. And remember when Kim Basinger bought that little town in Georgia? I keep forgetting this is the South. All kinds of weird crap happens here that couldn’t happen anywhere else.”
“A sentiment best kept to yourself,” he said.
They drove past a Greek Revival funeral home and a church. Most of the tan sandstone buildings in the three-block downtown area looked as though they’d been constructed early in the twentieth century. The wide main street had diagonal parking on both sides. Blue spotted a restaurant, a drugstore, a resale shop, and a bakery. A stuffed deer with an OPEN sign hanging from an antler stood guard near the door of an antique store named Aunt Myrtle’s Attic. Just across the street, old trees shaded a park with a four-sided clock and black iron lampposts topped with white globes. Dean pulled into a parking space in front of the pharmacy.
Blue didn’t have much faith in his comment about her being on his payroll, and she wondered if she could find a job in such a small town. “Do you notice anything strange?” she said as he flicked off the ignition.
